When did you first encounter poetry? How did you discover that you wanted to write poems?
I fell in love with poetry through an elective workshop in college. That’s where I first read a full collection by a contemporary American poet (Jerome Rothenberg), and understood how much of life could be explored and expressed in verse. It was so much fun for me to learn this new way of using language. At that time, I was an East Asian Studies major. I was planning to spend a few years after graduation in Japan, then work in the international corporate world, but, when I was abroad in Kyoto my last semester in Fall 2008, I ended up becoming very ill. I realized that my life was not going to follow the path I expected. This was also in 2008 when America was headed into a major recession, and so I came home sick with a pile of debt, no career, and no jobs to be found. I had to re-envision what I might do with my life, and I figured if I can’t make money I might as well be happy. Hence, poetry.
Do you have a writing routine? A favorite time or place to write?
Yes! It’s varied over the years, but I write a lot, since last year especially. I joined the Stafford Challenge and started doing a poem a day (I fell about 50 short last year, but I’m slightly ahead for this year!). I tend to sit down and write in spurts though, so I might write many poems on Thursday for example and take other days off. A friend and I also try and get together once a week to write. We just go back and forth for a while, exchanging prompts and seeing what we come up with. Of course, most of those poems don’t end up working out, but it’s good for me to get a lot of material out onto the page. I don’t need to be in any particular place or location, but if I have an idea for a poem I try to get straight to a notebook/laptop/notes app before it can get away from me.
Where do your poems most often “come from”—an image, a sound, a phrase, an idea?
Poems rarely come from images for me, I’m not at heart a very visual person. I tend to think of a good turn of phrase (or mishear someone else) or be struck by an idea and jump into the poem from there. Lately, I’ve been using a lot of prompts as well. I find, as I get older, I can’t wait around for inspiration if I want to get somewhere in my writing. I also love reading and responding to another poet’s work.
Which writers (living or dead) have influenced you the most?
Oh! So many, I read poetry almost exclusively. Though I’m somewhat particular in how I want my poems to move and what I want to say as a poet, I rarely meet a poem I don’t like. I try to be very open, it’s easy to get too attached to a style or idea about what poetry “is.” Nothing is better for me than coming across a new mode or style of expression in another poet’s work. Even if it doesn’t end up being something that touches my own work, I feel like I understand how language can move us a little bit better afterward. And, since I still haven’t named anybody, I’ll say Ginsberg. I feel like I don’t hear people citing him as an influence as much nowadays, but I’ve always loved the grandness of the voice in his poems and the way he never made a complete divide between the personal and the political in his work. I try to keep that duality in mind. Also, though much of his work is just so-so to me, his moments of genius are transcendent. I think this is true of a lot of the great poets we collectively remember. I can only hope that, after a lifetime of work, I have a few worth holding onto as well.
What excites you most about your new collection?
My new chapbook, Hard Up from Lily Poetry Review Books, is all on the theme of money, work, retail, and capitalism. For years I resisted putting these pieces together, thinking it would be a bit “too much.” I have to thank my friend January Gill O’Neil, she kept encouraging me to go for it anyway, and now I love it. The book was treated with such care by the press and is so beautifully designed, that I’m so grateful every time I pick it up. In terms of why I write about these themes, I grew up on welfare with a single mom in a middle-class town and then went to an Ivy League university, so money and class were always central to my idea of my identity in the world. I was often in places where I was (or thought I was) the only person who came from a low-class background. Plus the Great Recession came at the start of my working and writing life, so these are just issues I had to think about a lot. Even now after all these years, I’m still hustling—both in life and poetry! Money and class shape the way we see the world, just like language does. They influence how we interact, how we judge ourselves and others, and how society organizes itself. And no one is outside of this system—rich or poor, banker or monk, financially literate or spendthrift. We’re all caught up in this together, just (hopefully) doing our best.
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M.P. Carver is a poet and visual artist from Salem, MA. She is Director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, miCrO-Founder of Molecule: a tiny lit mag, and teaches creative and digital writing at Salem State University. Her work has been published in Rattle, Mantis, Jubilat, and Love’s Executive Order, among others. She has received funding from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Essex Community Foundation. In 2023 her poem “In Vitro” was named a finalist in the Connecticut River Review’s Experimental Poetry Contest, and in 2022 her poem “You & God & I” was awarded the New England Poetry Club’s E.E. Cummings Prize. Her chapbook, Selachipmorpha, was published by Incessant Pipe in 2015. Her second chapbook, Hard Up, is out from Lily Poetry Review Books in early 2025.
